Freddy's not an unintelligent lad, so I shan't accuse him of forgettin' exactly who it is that he and his family and their Boy and their Party profess to be at "war" with, only of openin' himself up to intellectual and moral corruption when he carries on like this.
"Beware of AEI! Be thou caveated, Freddie Kagan! AEI corrupts. Look what it has done quite recently to my Col. Spook (your ideobuddy R. M. Gerecht) and my Col. Blimp (your ideobuddy V. D. Hanson), both of them in close connection with the GOP Kiddie Krusade and a' that and a' that. The former started out with a questionable, but intellectually presentable-for-dsiputation, thesis about bringin' democracy to the backward indigs of the Levant. The latter started out with an even more questionable, yet formerly very traditional and still potentially pulse-quickenin' sentimentalism about Ares, the Father of all good things. The original Gerechtianity and the original Hanson product were certainly not the two best systems of thought and feelin' that anybody human ever came up with, even by Wingnut City standards, but nevertheless they had character, they had style, their schemes were to be praised as Goethe praised Bohemia: no Italy, obviously, yet still ein eigenes Land -- how you say in Greater Texan? -- "its own sort of land." Neocomrades Gerecht and Hanson are of "their own sort" no longer, unfortunately. Nowadays they are mostly of an AEI-corrupted sort. Not altogether, to be sure, for they remain far more worth reading than the hordes of mechanical wind-up-toy ideologues who were never at any point independently viable intellectual fetuses outside the para- or quasi- or pseudo-academic womb of tank thinkin'. All the same, most of the former Eigentümlichkeit has departed from both Spook and Blimp. A deplorable amount of their recent writing consists of Boy-'n'-Party agitprop that Dr. Limbaugh could probably have done rather better, things such as -- ahem! -- NewYorkTimes-bashin'.
"Don't ever let it happen to you, young Freddie!"
| Misunderstanding the Surge The New York Times wrongly judges the plan and the commanders who are executing it. by Frederick W. Kagan 06/05/2007 12:48:00 AM Yesterday the New York Times published yet another article in an ongoing series that might be called "The Surge Has Failed." This one was titled "Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal." The article reports on a one-page summary of a document the Times characterized only as an "internal military assessment." According to that document and interviews with some commanders, the paper argues that the Baghdad Security Plan is not meeting its goals in securing the population of Baghdad, largely because of sectarian bias within the Iraqi police. The article contains some important distortions. The authors state, "American commanders have also had to send troops outside the capital, to deal with a sharp rise in violence in Diyala Province and to search for American soldiers kidnapped south of the capital." In fact, Generals Raymond Odierno and David Petraeus decided from the outset to deploy additional U.S. forces to the "belts" around Baghdad, both south and north, in order to interdict the lines of communication used by both Sunni and Shiia terrorists to send weapons and fighters into Baghdad. Violence had been rising in Diyala since mid-2006, and the U.S. command decided to address it early this year because instability there contributes directly to violence in Baghdad. The southern belts house car-bomb factories and terrorist safe-havens, which is why MNF-I decided to clear them before attempting to secure Baghdad. The decisions to flow additional forces into these areas slowed the pace of clear-and-hold operations in Baghdad, but these operations will go a long way toward ensuring that peace established in the capital will be stable and durable. The decision to flow forces into the belts was a sensible adaptation to the reality on the ground at the start of the new plan. The problematic New York Times article elides two very different military plans into one. General George Casey began developing a new plan to stem the rising tide of violence at the end of 2006. Casey's plan was based on the same presuppositions that had guided the U.S. war effort in Iraq since late 2003. President Bush announced a new strategy on January 10, 2007, and he changed the command team in order to implement it. In mid-February General David Petraeus replaced General Casey as the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. Since the change of command, Generals Petraeus and Odierno have made clear that they did not accept the rosy scenarios of security by summer that General Casey had been pushing. General Petraeus and General Casey differed in their assessments of what U.S. forces in Iraq could achieve by summer because they had different ideas about how to accomplish U.S. objectives in the country. Since taking command in mid-2004, Casey had been focused on using Iraqi forces to establish and maintain security throughout Iraq and on "transitioning" responsibility for security to those forces. He remained undaunted by reports that the Iraqi Security Forces were contributing to the violence by participating in sectarian cleansing. By the end of 2006, the National Police were particularly problematic in this regard. Nevertheless, at the turn of the new year General Casey still preferred a plan that would rely on overly-optimistic projections of the capabilities and performance of Iraqi Security Forces, just as the two failed attempts to clear Baghdad in 2006--Operations Together Forward I and II--had done. The Bush administration made a mistake by attempting to cast the new strategy that General Petraeus would ultimately design and execute as a minor modification of Casey's strategy, and by insisting that U.S. units would be partnered with Iraqi Army, National Police, and Iraqi Police units throughout Baghdad. But Generals Petraeus and Odierno learned the lessons of 2006 better than that. American forces in Baghdad are partnered with Iraqi units where possible, but are focused primarily on securing the Iraqi population rather than on pushing the Iraqi Security Forces into the lead, which had been Casey's primary focus. Petraeus and Odierno also knew that securing the population would take most of 2007, which is why they never predicted success by July, as Casey had done. Despite months of clear statements from the senior commanders in Baghdad to this effect, the New York Times has paid no heed, and is now trying to compare the progress of the actual, much more realistic, plan being conducted by American and Iraqi forces to the goals of the unrealistic plans developed by the now-departed commander. The paper's comparison is meaningless. Generals Petraeus and Odierno have made it clear that it is not possible to make even a preliminary assessment of whether their plans are working before September 2007, and they have indicated that operations and U.S. forces will need to be sustained at a high level into 2008. They are right. |
Little Freddy Kagan, like almost everybody else, should always be accorded broad and generous leeway to expound her own argument -- or to expound AEI's tank-think argument, for that matter -- however vicious and sophistical the argumentation, without perpetual interruptions from the peanut gallery. I promise not to interrupt again, but kindly allow me to quote the quite short passage from this NYTC story that most struck me: ... The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods. In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” ....
Now back to Freddy. Onwards!
| The discussion in the New York Times article about the involvement of Iraqi Police in sectarian killings and attacks against U.S. soldiers is portrayed as a major setback in the context of these elided plans. It is not. It is the same situation U.S. forces have been dealing with since early 2006, when sectarian violence began to rise in the first place. This is precisely why Congressional recommendations to accelerate the handover to Iraqi forces are mistaken. The current coalition plan--and the New York Times does not even note that General Petraeus has just completed a thorough review of the situation and developed a new campaign plan to guide coalition efforts henceforth--takes this situation into account much more thoroughly than the discredited and discarded approaches of 2004-2006. The appropriate adjustment of military strategy to reality on the ground has led to a more realistic appraisal of the time required for success, as well as an approach far more likely to lead to success. The details of the sectarian violence described in the Times article are not particularly instructive. The neighborhoods mentioned are among the very worst in Baghdad, and have been for some time. U.S. forces are just getting set in some of them and just beginning major clearing operations in others. As we have noted many times, when coalition forces begin clearing operations in areas the enemy had held for a long time, coalition casualties go up. The enemy fights U.S. forces in order to maintain their ability to pursue their ends. Defeating the enemy is necessary to provide basic security to the population, the essential precondition for any meaningful progress in Iraq. The causes of Iraqi civilian casualties, on the other hand, are the same as they have been for more than a year--al Qaeda attacks and attacks by rogue elements of the Jaysh al Mahdi. But overall sectarian violence remains at about half of the December level--a marked change considering that violence had been rising continuously since early 2006. Even with the increased al Qaeda violence added in, the level of violence remains stable--again, a positive change from a situation in which violence appeared to be rising uncontrollably. And it matters a great deal that the last U.S. units have just begun to arrive. We should note--as General Odierno did in a recent press conference--that it takes time for a unit newly arrived in theater to begin to operate effectively. It must develop an understanding of the neighborhood, an intelligence picture of the enemy, and build relationships with key local figures before it can even begin to start effective clear-and-hold operations. All that takes time--anywhere from 30 to 60 days, depending on the unit and the neighborhood. In the interim, violence increases as sectarian actors try to achieve their goals before the new unit can become effective, and as entrenched enemies make strenuous efforts to keep coalition forces out of areas that they control. After all, there are no coalition casualties in areas where there are no coalition forces--even areas that the enemy holds. Then U.S. forces must clear the enemy from these areas by engaging in major combat operations that often last for several weeks. And holding an area after it has been cleared takes even more time. This New York Times article and many people who favor shutting down the current strategy fail to understand or acknowledge how long large-scale counter-insurgency operations take or what they look like in their decisive stages. They also refuse to recognize that the current strategy is a departure from--and not a continuation of--the approach that had failed to control violence from 2004 to the end of 2006. Some opponents of the plan now propose returning to General Casey's failed strategy by focusing exclusively on the training of Iraqi security forces and using them instead of U.S. forces--the very strategy that had allowed violence to spiral out of control in the first place. There will be many difficult months to come, as our enemies attempt not only to make the strategy fail, but to convince Americans and Iraqis that it will fail. There is no guarantee that any military strategy will succeed, of course, which is why commanders should evaluate the progress of their strategy. But our new military commanders have understood the problems mentioned in the Times article for months, and they are actively working to solve them. The New York Times wrongly judges the current commanders by their predecessors' expectations. And it wrongly presents their efforts to solve legacy problems as evidence that the current effort has failed. It may be emotionally easier for some simply to convince themselves that the U.S. has already failed in Iraq. But success remains possible if we have the will to try to achieve it. |
Well, maybe, but meanwhile it's hard for me not to notice that little Freddy Kagan of AEI never does quite come to grips with what would seem the most urgent enemy, "American and Iraqi forces [are] able to protect the population and maintain physical influence over only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods." Freddy doesn't deny the NYTC/DOD numbers, Freddy doesn't confirm the NYTC/DOD numbers, Freddy just ignores 'em. Possibly we lay sheep are to infer that such discouraging numbers are all the fault of former GOP-anointed boobs like Casey and Abizaid, whereas our now GOP neo-anointeds, Petraeus and Odierno, will swiftly -- as swiftly as possible, anyway, though perhaps it may take fifty years, like in South Korea -- set all to right at last. (But little Freddy does not expressly say that.)
Are these bad numbers -- numbers not DOD-denied or AEI-denied or even denied by Freddie Kagan-- only a "legacy problem"? Did Casey and Abizaid suppose that the extremist GOP could somehow attain its Mr. Karl Rove's ever-hotly-panted-after public relations Success and Victory in the former "Iraq" without any population protection or neigborhood "physical influence" provided at New Baghdad? (But little Freddy does not expressly say that either.)
=====
All things considered, Mr. Bones, is it not, on the whole, a great pleasure not be some little para-academic tank-thinker like Rear-Corporal Frederick Kagan of AEI is?
WE are free to know what we want and complain when we don't get it, although perhaps our complaints will be ineffectual. Whereas poor Freddy . . . . What a dreadful lot is Señorito Freddy Kagan's, Mr. Bones! it boggles the mind and troubles the heart even to imagine such a lot as his. All one's valuables, one's individual careerist TankThink valuables and all one's Family Mars-not-Venus valuables and all one's Party or "conservative" "ideology" valuables, absolutely eveythin' one has spread out there on the table at the Casino of Human Events bettin' on Rancho Crawford's Surge of '07™, when one has no better notion than the Crawfordites themselves do exactly what anybody is surgin' for, no control over the Crawfordites, and no Plan B. Should _rouge_ come up rather than _noir_, Freddy is ruined.
And yet ...and yet .... Hath not gamblin' been acclaimed as if it were gallantry?
My dear and only Love, I pray
This noble world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
But purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,
Which virtuous souls abhor,
And hold a synod in thy heart,
I'll never love thee more.
Like Alexander I will reign,
And I will reign alone:
My thoughts shall evermore disdain
A rival on my throne.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That puts it not unto the touch
To win or lose it all.
====
Poor Freddy Kagan has such a mountain of odds stacked up against him (and his Family and his ThinkTank and his Boy and his Party), that his success would be almost as antecedently improbable as Macedon's against Persia, and should, by some fluke, Rancho Crawford's Surge of '07™ actually "succeed,", probably the ensuin' Crawfordocracy would subsequently fall apart at least as quickly as Alexander's racket did.
This is all very well, Mr. Bones, and I agree with it. Nevertheless may I not romantically and, if you really must insist, even "unseriously" celebrate the GOP/AEI's poor corrupted Freddy Kagan the way their own "conservative" Sir Walter once celebrated poor (but not in the end seriously corrupted) Edward Waverley?
Try not to be such a Boston blue-nose, Bones! One can be símpatico with a Wingnut City specimen like this little Freddy Kagan of AEI without assenting in the slightest to any of its cheapjack ideological notions, no matter how relentlesly vociferated.
No comments:
Post a Comment